New MP3 License Terms Demand $0.75 Per Decoder 1249
Götz writes "The licensing terms of Thomson and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, who are the owners of the mp3 patents, have changed. Now not only mp3 encoders but also
mp3 decoders require a license. This page lists the fees -- it's $0.75 per decoder. As a consequence, Red Hat has already removed all mp3 players from the Rawhide development version."
Probable consequences? (Score:2, Informative)
Hopefully we'll see another format step up and produce the same quality / compression as
These prices were up last year. (Score:-1, Informative)
This is just another case of
Winamp download still available free (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What can MP3 do for me that Ogg Vorbis can't? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Portable Ogg-based players? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:These prices were up last year. (Score:2, Informative)
They did. The original post is just another case of a user trolling for Karma by claiming the Slashdot editors are making a big deal out of nothing.
Re:Probable consequences? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please. (Score:5, Informative)
/Janne
You Dips (Score:2, Informative)
this IS a change from before (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Or, rather, right, but wrong with respect to a very technical point that has escaped notice so far.
Previously decoders which were released for free for personal use were exempt [debian.org] from the licensing fees. This covers winamp, xmms, mpg123, and all the other free software players you love.
That exemption has been removed. Now everything costs 75 cents, no matter whether it's free software or not. And that, my friend, is a big deal.
Re:These prices were up last year. (Score:4, Informative)
This is just another case of
Actually, you are incorrect; the editors did not do anything wrong in this case. While the rates have been around, they were lower previously. Take a look at the previous royalty page courtesy of the Wayback Machine [archive.org].
I also have a feeling that if they are going to increase the rates, they are going to make a point of charging for the royalty fees as well.
Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:3, Informative)
mpg123 -s file.mp3 | oggenc -o file.ogg -
Of course, make sure to tailor the oggenc command-lind as necessary (quality levels, etc).
The minimum's the kicker for me... (Score:4, Informative)
US$ 15 000.00 per calendar year.
Now that's a pain. I emailed them to see if I could get a "hobbyist license" for more per app, but without the $15k minimum (wanted to make "iTunes 3 for Classic Mac OS"). They allow you to release up to 5000 units of a game that uses mp3s royalty free, so I was hopeful. The reply? No dice. (I was impressed they sent a reply!)
Fwiw, here's a list of the licensees [mp3licensing.com].
Re:You Dips (Score:2, Informative)
Re:MAD, lame and other GPL'd MP3 codecs (Score:3, Informative)
I think you mean a clean-room reimplementation, not reverse engineering.
You can infringe patents even if you independently develop the same idea (which is even more drastic than the clean-room reimplementation situation). That's the way patents are designed. A limited-time monopoly to an idea in exchange for complete, public documentation of the idea.
Re:Do they not realize the effect of this? (Score:5, Informative)
What's new is that the longstanding royalty exception for free software / freeware programs has been removed. I can't find any historical info on the exception from the mp3 licensing site (probably because Fraunhofer isn't eager to publicize the fact that there once was an exception), but if you look in other places like the Debian mailing lists [debian.org], you can read what the old policy was.
MP3 to OGG Converters (Score:2, Informative)
linux [vorbis.com]
Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please. (Score:3, Informative)
vorbis faq entry on the topic [vorbis.com]
Re:Winamp download still available free (Score:2, Informative)
And to clarify, end users are not responsible [mp3licensing.com] for the payment of any licensing fees for software that uses the mp3 patents.
Bammkkkk
Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:4, Informative)
Take for example making a photocopy of a passage from a book. You then take this photocopy and fax it to me. The quality degradation is that same that will happen when you transcode from MP3 to Ogg.
So if you have MP3s currently, either leave them as MP3, or re-rip them directly from the CD(You did pay for these songs, right?
Re:What about overseas distributions? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Do they not realize the effect of this? (Score:2, Informative)
Couldn't they claim they licensed the patent under the previous scheme? is there something that makes such a license revokable? IANAL... or a doctor for that matter.
Re:For GOD'S sake.... (Score:0, Informative)
It's a free, open source alternative that's been out-performing mp3 for years now.
Many thanks to all of the Ogg Vorbis enthusiasts posting in this thread!
Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation
Re:screw ogg (Score:1, Informative)
"Using the LAME encoding engine (or other mp3 encoding technology) in your software may require a patent license in some countries."
Yea, the encoder may be given to you for free, but you cannot legally use it for free. The patent is on the MP3 format. How do you make an MP3 that is royalty free, while still being an MP3? It doesn't happen.
Just use Ogg. It won't hurt you.
Could be worse. (Score:5, Informative)
1. This is an open standard. It's just patented. Patents expire. Nobody is trying to prevent you from writing decoders - they just want to get paid for (I hope) work that they did in developing the technology, which is pretty cool, and which I don't think I could have invented on my own. I am not fond of software patents, but a patent on MP3 is not the same as a patent on one-click or xor cursors.
Compare this to, for example, Real Media player, where the file format isn't *patented* - it's a trade secret. So if Real doesn't support your platform, you can't play real media. This is really awful - much worse than the patent situation with mp3.
2. The royalty is quite reasonable. If you had to pay $0.75 for your copy of WinAMP, would that really seem unfair to you? That's the price of a can of coke, for Pete's sake! It it really that unfair?
3. Like it or not, this is not going to kill MP3, because most MP3 players are commercial, licensed products, and there are a ton of them out there, and they don't support Vorbis. So you don't have to do anything to keep using your MP3s, but if you want to use Vorbis in protest, it's going to be very difficult.
4. I have a large library of audio files that need to get published on the net. They're free, noncommercial, non-revenue-generating. I'll publish them at least in MP3 format, and maybe Ogg if I can get a good encoder. I have a feeling that if I publish Ogg, it's not going to get downloaded very much, but it'll be interesting to see.
Re:Be Afraid (Score:3, Informative)
Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please. (Score:5, Informative)
Almost certainly, yes. An encoder would use a different strategy to encode a 128 kbit MP3 and a 192 kbit MP3. If certain frequency ranges are discarded when encoding 128 kbit, and other frequency ranges when encoding 192kbit, if you encode to 128kbit, and decode/recode to 192kbit, you will lose both ranges of frequencies.
why wouldn't you be able to produce an ogg from an mp3 that is no worse than the mp3?
See above.
I just don't buy the blanket argument that lossy -> lossy has to produce even more lossy.
Depends on the nature of the lossiness, grasshopper.
Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:5, Informative)
You have been tricked. WMA is inferior quality but the encoder boosts the volume by 3 db which is known to make people think it sounds better.
Now I think that WMA does a better job for very low bitrate compared to mp3 (but of course ogg rules here) but WMA, overall, is inferior quality.
Re:Probable consequences? (Score:4, Informative)
Winamp already has a license, and they don't pay 75 cents per download either. Winamp draws revenue because their mindshare gets people to winamp.com, AOL also pushes Winamp (they own Nullsoft now).
You can pay the one time fee and continue to develop a freeware player, Thomson and Fraunhofer Gesellschaft want you to continue to use mp3, they don't want to kill it. They simply are letting people know that they want everyone to pay up.
Is it kind of dumb to do this? Maybe, but you must understand this won't kill mp3. Your hardware mp3 player will come with the decoder license (of course) and your freeware player will have paid for it first too.
Simply: just because the player is freeware doesn't mean the developers are poor. Nullsoft has AOL/TW behind them and Windows Media Player? I don't know anyone tighter with Fraunhofer.
But, BTW: Ogg is just as good if not better than mp3. Maybe not as popular, but the fidelity is there.
Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please. (Score:5, Informative)
I've just gotten into this (ignored the MP3 bandwagon), but my plan is to use flac, a lossless encoder, then re-enc to the lossy format de jour as needed.
-Peter
Re:Do they not realize the effect of this? (Score:1, Informative)
Also, they removed the options for distributing free encoders. Last time I checked, encoders could be distributed for free for non-commercial purposes if they were constrained to a 56 kb/s bitrate.
This may not kill mp3, but it will sure turn many people into patent infringers. -kali
Want to play your mp3 CDs in a few years? (Score:5, Informative)
MP3 only came up because it was available at low-to-no-cost. Regarding some of the patents, of course. Nobody would've had used it if they had charged this decoder fee from the very beginning, and they know!
Do what I am going to do: Write a letter (paper!) to Fraunhofer and Thomson and explain your concerns.
Yes, I know about Ogg Vorbis and stuff, but there's no reason not to protest against changed mp3 licenses.
I don't want to re-compress all my mp3s to Ogg because this will reduce quality. So I will still have mp3s around in several years (don't mention all those CDs I burned). So this is an issue, since I will need a player/decoder to access them.
Contact Fraunhofer:
Fraunhofer Institut für Integrierte SchaltungenAm Wolfsmantel 33
91058 Erlangen
Germany
Phone +49 (0) 91 31/7 76-0
Fax +49 (0) 91 31/7 76-9 99
Email: info@iis.fhg.de [mailto]
(Interesting: On the English homepage, their postal address doesn't show up - only eMail addresses. On the German homepage, it does.)
Contact Thomson:
Thomson multimedia16935 W. Bernardo Drive # 103
San Diego, CA 92127
USA
Fax: +1.858.451.6916
Email: info@mp3licensing.com [mailto]
integer decoders & whatnot (Score:3, Informative)
- A free fixed point decoder [linux.org.uk] has been announced [handhelds.org].
- With version 1.0 out now, Vorbis is pretty solid for decoding. Ongoing development is expected to not break decoding functionality.
- Legal complications [kuro5hin.org] remain embarrassingly unresolved.
(Posting in Mozilla 1.1 from WinXP. Hope this works.)Supposedly the Ogg-on-a-Chip Project [sourceforge.net] has a workable hardware design. I've not heard of anyone planning to build these tho.
All audio coding is lossy (Score:3, Informative)
I like DAT best. It's pure digital, and doesn't do any compression
DAT is lossy. It loses all frequencies above 24 kHz (48 kHz sample rate + Nyquist-Shannon theorem [wikipedia.com]). It loses all signals below -120 dB due to the effective 20-bit performance of 16-bit dithered PCM. It loses the front-and-back dimension.
The question becomes how much loss a fellow can tolerate. For audio engineers, 24-bit 96 kHz WAV works well (AIFF is limited to 65,535 Hz). (Cool Edit Pro supports 32-bit floating-point, which has incredible dynamic range.) For consumers, even audiophiles with high-quality amps and speakers, 192 kbps Ogg is more than enough for stereo audio.
Re: They've got a good racket going... (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're missing a very important fact here: Algorithms as employed in the MP3 format were NOT patentable in many countries when MP3 first showed up and Fraunhofer's reference implementation was published.
I'm really glad that not that many countries have jumped that US "you can patent everything, including algorithms and IP" train even yet.
Re:Be Afraid (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:5, Informative)
Re-rip your CD collection from scratch, and encode directly to
Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/listen.html
There have also been listening tests done recently, and at higher bitrates.
To save you some time... (Score:3, Informative)
Oggasm [freshmeat.net]
mp32ogg [freshmeat.net]
Mp3 to Vorbis [freshmeat.net]
Re:thank god for LAME (Score:3, Informative)
"Following the great history of GNU naming, LAME originally stood for LAME Ain't an Mp3 Encoder. LAME started life as a GPL'd patch against the dist10 ISO demonstration source, and thus was incapable of producing an mp3 stream or even being compiled by itself. But in May 2000, the last remnants of the ISO source code were replaced, and now LAME is the source code for a fully LGPL'd MP3 encoder, with speed and quality to rival all commercial competitors."
http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/ - the LAME project. [mp3dev.org]
Fair use (Score:4, Informative)
Dedicated MPEG chip (Score:3, Informative)
If you had bought an iPod for your MP3 player, you could have been secure in the knowledge that ogg can be added at any time with an extremely simple firmware upgrade.
Are you sure? How do you know that the iPod player doesn't have a dedicated MP3 chip that takes an MPEG audio bitstream on one set of pins and produces WAV audio on another? (It does.)
Re:this IS a change from before (Score:3, Informative)
No, LAME got around the patent by releasing source code only. Patent law explicitly allows descriptions of inventions (which source code falls under) to be distributed free of patent retrictions. Hence the name LAME (LAME Ain't an Mp3 Encoder), it is just a description of one. If you compile and use LAME for any commercial gain, you are probably supposed to pay a license fee.
Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:2, Informative)
If you like your 3db gain then go download sox and add it to your encode path (a simple shell script should be able to pipe data around to make you a super mp3 encoder)
Brian
Re:mpg123 is not open source (Score:3, Informative)
Now that I've finally gotten a chance to comment.. (Score:5, Informative)
First off, like somebody said, this has always been the case, but there was no enforcement. So it's really not new.. As far as hardware players, a LOT of them use chips made by other companies (like TI or whatever). Now, I would think that TI would have to pay, not the company selling the MP3 players made with the device.. so then they charge the company making the player with their device an extra $0.75 and so on until you pay when you get the player. And being such a big company like TI or the others that make MP3 decoding chips, I would think they would have worked out patent stuff before, and since they were charging (just not enforcing) I bet that this is already happening.
The real bind is when it comes to software, and they've been doing this with encoding, and stuff like BLADE and LAME are still around and kicking, so I don't see why things like XMMS and mpeg123 would be effected.. I think RedHat's move is silly, but that's just me.
Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:3, Informative)
Sure they can. There may be millions of people USING the currently available MP3 players, but there are only a few developers and companies who are distributing/marketing the players (either for fee (M$) or for free (sourceforge)). You don't need to bother the users at all. "You are distributing application X, therefore send us the money for each copy of applicaton X downloaded." The end-user doesn't matter in this situation. It's the distributor who will be on the hook.
Re:to the rescue (Score:4, Informative)
The Vorbis 1.0 release came with a complete specification [xiph.org]. I'm currently using these specs to implement lossless editing code for Ogg Vorbis files, so I can speak to their accuracy and completeness.
Let me guess: You formed all your opinions based on Rob Leslie's old kuro5hin article [kuro5hin.org], and didn't bother to see if they were still valid. Right?
Re:And pay seven times more (Score:3, Informative)
FUD ahoy! (Score:3, Informative)
Now, kiddies, can we please understand the *real* significance of this?
Point #1: it's not actually clear how new all this is. I've been looking at the relevant page with the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org) and it seems from that that the current terms came in in August 2001, which hardly makes this news.
But, for the moment, let's assume this is NEW and EXCITING! What's changed?
Well, for a long time, Fraunhofer have charged patent royalty for all MP3 encoders and all non-freely distributed MP3 decoders. This means there is exactly zero difference for your hardware MP3 player and any software MP3 player which costs money; the makers of these will have already been paying these (minuscule) patent royalties since they started manufacturing the device.
The change (if it *is* a new development) is that there used to be an exemption for freely-distributed MP3 decoders. Now there isn't. This means that to distribute such players you need to purchase a license for the distribution from the patent holder.
The charges they are asking, in commercial terms, are *peanuts*. AOL, owners of Nullsoft who publish Winamp, can pay a flat fee of $50k to be able to distribute Winamp with MP3 decoding capability forever. They no doubt already have. $50k is absolutely NOTHING to AOL, it probably came out of petty cash. Same goes for Microsoft (WMP) and Apple (iTunes or whatever).
To you as an end-user the impact of this is precisely zero. If you use a freely downloaded MP3 encoder in the US you're almost certainly already breaking patent legislation; no-one seems to care about doing this, and certainly no-one's going to try and arrest you for it. Most people use iTunes, WMP or WinAmp to play their audio anyway; as mentioned already, the owners of these will have paid their patent fees already and it's perfectly legal to do so. (By the by, you can't send Fraunhofer 75 cents to pay for your usage of some decoder; that's what the $15k minimum payment is about. These terms are exclusively aimed at publishers, that's how patent law works; the publisher pays the patent royalty and passes the cost on to the consumer, somehow. You don't pay it yourself directly.)
So all this doesn't matter two fucks as far as you personally are concerned, as far as people who use WMP, iTunes or Winamp are concerned, and as far as encoding MP3s is concerned.
THE ONLY SIGNIFICANT EFFECT OF THIS "NEWS" IS ON POOR COMPANIES WHO DISTRIBUTE FREE MP3 DECODERS. i.e. - Linux distribution vendors.
As mentioned, to Microsoft, Apple or AOL, $50k is peanuts. To SuSE, Mandrake, or Debian, it's not necessarily. Plus, for Linux distributors, there's an ancillary problem. Linux vendors generally license their product as being freely redistributable; when you download Mandrake you can perfectly legally then pass it on to someone else. The terms of the patent license you can buy for MP3s wouldn't allow this; even if Mandrake or Debian or Red Hat purchased a license to distribute an MP3 decoder they couldn't legally distribute it under a license which allowed it to be freely redistributed.
So the big problem is for Linux vendors. They're faced with a dilemma. They have several possible options. 1, carry on as before and hope they don't get prosecuted for patent infringement, out of the goodness of Fraunhofer's heart. 2, immediately take all MP3 decoding functionality out of their distribution. 3, buy a patent license and somehow modify the license of their distribution so the MP3 decoding functionality cannot be legally redistributed. 4, somehow fork the distribution so the MP3 decoding functionality is not legally available in countries where Fraunhofer have a patent on MP3 decoding but is available in countries where they don't - remember, there's countries where this whole issue is void because Fraunhofer have no patent. Patent law is national, not international.
There's dirtier options, too. One i've suggested exploits the fact that you can legally distribute the source code to something that infringes patent under US law. (This is why you can legally download the LAME encoder source code in the US). Thus it would probably be legal for distros to remove the binary RPMs for MP3 decoding functionality but include source RPMs and instructions on compiling them, along with a disclaimer stating that it would be illegal to do so in the US.
But I digress. My basic point is a lot of stuff in this thread is silly, frivolous, misinformed, and irrelevant. The big issue of this patent is purely and simply a problem for Linux vendors.